Russia and Turkey are negotiating to maintain gas deliveries from Russian energy giant Gazprom as two major pipeline supply contracts near expiration, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The deals between Gazprom and Turkey’s state-owned pipeline company BOTAŞ, covering up to 21.75 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year, are set to expire on December 31, according to Bloomberg.
Sources familiar with the talks told Bloomberg that both sides aim to keep the annual supply volume at about 22 billion cubic meters.
Neither Gazprom nor Turkey’s energy ministry or BOTAŞ commented on the ongoing negotiations.
The report comes as Turkey faces increasing pressure from the administration of US President Donald Trump to curb energy purchases from Russia, whose oil and gas revenues help fund its war on Ukraine.
Following new US sanctions last month on Russia’s two largest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, Turkish refiners began cutting imports of Russian crude.
Turkey has previously resisted Western efforts to restrict Russian gas purchases, which mostly arrive through long-term contracts and direct pipelines linking the two countries.
In September Turkey signed a series of new liquefied natural gas contracts, including with US suppliers, as part of efforts to diversify its energy sources.
Turkey is also expanding production from its offshore Sakarya field in the Black Sea, raising expectations that domestic output could reduce the need for imports.
Bloomberg said Gazprom shipped 21.6 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey last year, according to data from Turkey’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA), making the country the second-largest buyer of Russian pipeline gas after China.
Turkey remains Europe’s fourth-largest natural gas market and imports almost all the gas it consumes, primarily from Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran.
Gazprom has lost most of its European customers since the war in Ukraine, making Turkey one of its most important remaining markets.
The company also stopped sending gas through Ukraine at the start of this year when a long-term transit contract expired, ending flows that had averaged about 15 billion cubic meters annually.